Hello folks,

I, like most other people who check out the Affiliate Forum on a regular basis have been impressed with the number of prizes on offer of late. Affiliate Future are running their annual trip to Barbados, the chaps at Sunshine are giving away holidays a plenty, Sky and Buy.at are offering “once in a lifetime” visits to the Grand Prix and IWOOT have (very comically in my opinion) got in on the act with their “no frills” version of the event. Classic chaps! We have even been partial to running the odd competition ourselves - normally at Christmas.

However, do affiliates want these competitions? Don’t get me wrong, I think the incentives are fantastic and I know for a fact that the winners of the Buyagift trips to Vegas have had a fantastic trip. So, let me rephrase the question….

As a merchant we only have a certain “margin” to work with, lets say for the sake of argument the standard margin is 25%. Most companies - unless they have a huge marketing budget - have to work within these margins with regards to all of their activities which consequently includes commission, prizes, network override, credit card processing charges etc.

So, my revised question is this…

Do affiliates prefer the chance to win a prize or would they prefer a higher commission?

I honestly don’t know the answer to this. some affiliates are commission junkies (cash is king), whilst others I know like the thrill of the chase. This obviously makes it pretty difficult for us Affiliate Managers. Do we splash out on a big prize or do we try and raise the commission by a % or two? In an ideal world we’d be able to offer huge commissions, massive cookie lengths and fantastic prizes for all of our affiliate buddies, but then we’d probably go bust very quickly.

Secondly how much impact do these super dooper prizes have?

If Buyagift for example (sorry Graham) didn’t run the trips to Vegas would affiliates still promote them because they are a good merchant, convert well, offer decent commission etc? If the answer is “Yes”, then there’s half an arguement not to run the competition so as to save themselves £ (x lots) in marketing expense. If, for example the trip to Vegas cost £20,000 (a complete guess) and Buyagift make 20% margin (again a complete guess) then to pay for the trip they will need to turnover an extra £100,000 just to break even. To flip this over completely, if they didn’t run the competition would they turnover £100,000 less? If the answer is no, then it’s difficult to justify the trip from a fiscal viewpoint.

As I say I’m completely flummoxed as to the right way to go on this one so answers on a postcard please…

 Over and out.

TBW.

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Hello folks,

I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching lately. Well, not strictly soul searching, but more over analysing what we do as a company. Hopefully objectively.

In the last couple of days I’ve had meetings with 2 marketing agencies - both of whom had relative merits. However, during those discussions, it dawned on me that we don’t have access to critical information which could dramatically transform our business. 

During their pitches I was asked all the usual questions  about turnover, unique visitors, ABV etc, but then was stumped when one of the chaps asked me “what is the lifetime value of one of your customers?“. I had no idea? I was flummoxed!

This then got me thinking… What is the lifetime of one of our customers? How many repeat customers do we have? Our Analytics package tells us that 20% of our Customers are repeat customers, but how many of these customers come back 3 or 4 times a year? In fact - who are our most valuable customers?

In a state of mild panic, this really got me thinking about the crux of the matter…

What do we do to retain Customers?

We, like every other merchant send out a general newsletter at prominent times of the year and send the odd personalised email out, but that’s pretty much it! Do we send out a personalised email when a new product comes in which is similar to their last purchase. No. Do we contact our top customers with Christmas cards (as traditional retailers often do with their top customers? No. Do we send out freebies to our top customers? Rarely. The list goes on…

In short, this demonstrates that we’re not doing a great deal to retain customers. The ironic thing here is that I’m sure it’s a lot easier to service an existing customer and to entice them into becoming a repeat customer than to find a new one. However, the vast majority of our effort is spent trying to find prospective customers, which when you think about it is a little backwards!

So - I’m going to write a “Customer Retention Plan” this arvo and make sure we do our utmost to entice our customers to come back to us time after time.

Toodle pip.

TBW

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I’ve spent a lot of this year doing in-depth analysis. Consequently I’ve been thinking of this question for a while now and whilst it is hypothetical I think it’s a valuable one to ask as an Affiliate Manager….

So. Would I promote Prezzybox if I was an affiliate?

Upon initial reflection this question seems pretty straight forward and I think the answer would be Yes.

Why? 

Well, Prezzybox have a reputation for being very pro-affiliate and attentive to affiliates needs. They offer lifetime commission, they always release creative and content early, they think outside the box (for example they were the first merchant to launch their Vidibox Video Content Units), they adopt all of the new initiatives that the networks provide and they’re generally good guys to work with.

But is this enough as competition in their sector grows?

Nowadays for example, more and more merchants are cottoning on to the fact that they have to produce a lot of creative in the form of content units, widgets Inter Alia. Consequently this isn’t as much of a differentiating factor for Prezzybox as it once was. Also, how important is commission rate, EPC, validation time period to an affiliate? And how much weight is attributed to this over all of the other ‘none-statistical’ personal factors?

Or, to put it another way, Would I promote Prezzybox instead of Merchant X, if Merchant X was paying higher commission or offering a longer cookie period?

Now, a lot of these questions are purely hypothetical and it’s difficult to look at them from a purely fiscal viewpoint. However, I think, in order to remain a proactive and popular merchant, we (and in fact every other merchant) need to be asking themselves these questions on a regular basis.

So, it looks like my current parlance with analytics is set to continue. I feel to maintain our position as one of the market leaders in our sector (in terms of affiliate marketing at least) I need to look at all of our competitors programmes (direct and indirect competitors) on a regular basis and analyse what they do better than us and leverage the areas where we are better than them.

And it’s just dawned on me…. that’s exactly what affiliates must do on a daily basis…

Over and out. ten ten.

TBW

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T-Bone - Prezzybox.com’s chief techy was 40 something so all of the team trudged off to the local hostelry the Les (or it’s officially title the Bird in Hand) and had a jolly cooked Dinner courtesy of Marlene and the team.

Then it dawned on me that a) I’d taken a jolly picture of the Les on Sunday morning when it was nice and snowy and b) it would be nice to show the aforementioned piccie of our local drinking hole.

Toodle pip.

TBW.

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Hello folks,

You’ll have to bear with me on this one as I’ve either hit on something that is splendidly simple (yet genius) or I’m talking absolute drivel! I still can’t decide.

Basically whilst researching some ingenious link building campaign (details to appear in a later blog post) I came across a Greek website. Albeit it was all Greek to me, I started to navigate through the site as if it were an English one.

Then it dawned on me (and this is the important bit)….

I could navigate through the site because it was built in a conventional manner using universal signs/imagery. So for example, the add to cart button had a little cart on it. You get the picture.

So, my tip for the day when designing a website is design it in the conventional way so that a foreign person, who speaks no English could navigate through it.

Now, this might sound like codswollap, but think about it for a minute. If your site complies to standard navigation, customer flow etc, then users who are used to navigating through other sites which have a standard navigation will find it easier to use your site. Consequently they should - in theory -  be able to navigate through your site and thus convert much easier.

 I know this might be a little boring and conventional, but look at this in terms of conversion rate. If your conversion rate is currently 2%, where 2 measly people out of every 100 buy from you, then if you increase your conversion rate by a mere 1%, your turnover will increase by a massive 50%!!!

So there we go folks, my tip for the day is design your website so even a foreigner can use it and your conversion rate will increase.

Over and out. Ten ten.

TBW.

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